Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence

Open to allJacob Boehme (1575–1624)931 of 1028 segments carry a modern register · 343 pp

Jacob Boehme — the works in English, and one in Frencheditor’s preface to the volume

Eleven books by a shoemaker of Görlitz who wrote, by his own account, because he could not help it. Ten of them stand here in the seventeenth-century English of John Sparrow, who translated Boehme within a generation of his death and whose prose is itself now four hundred years old; where that English has drifted out of reach, the facing pane carries a modern register — the same text with archaic inflection and spelling normalised by rule, never paraphrased. Nothing is reworded, and where no register appears beside a passage it is because the rules found nothing to change.

The eleventh book is not in English at all, and it is the reason this note exists.

Des trois principes de l'essence divine, printed at Paris in 1802, is the same work as Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, which stands here as the second book — the same twenty-seven chapters in the same order, opening `Du premier principe de l'essence divine` against Sparrow's `Of the first Principle of the Divine Essence`. Its translator was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who gave the last years of his life to putting Boehme into French, and who has a shelf of his own in this Lycaeum.

That makes a closed circuit inside this archive, and it is worth naming plainly. Saint-Martin translates Boehme. La Iniciación, printed in Montevideo a hundred and forty years later, traces its own descent through Saint-Martin. A reader can therefore follow one thread from a German mystic of 1619, through the French philosopher who carried him into another language, to a Spanish-language monthly of the 1940s that claimed them both — and read every step of it in the original.

The two are shelved as one work rather than two because that is what they are. They are not set as facing panes: an English translation of 1619 and a French translation of 1802 are two independent readings of a lost German original, and pairing them line by line would assert a correspondence neither translator ever claimed.

page 1

Concerning

The Three Principles

The Divine Essence

Of the Eternal, Dark, Light, and Temporary World

Concerning

The Three Principles

The Divine Essence

Jacob Boehme

Translated by John Sparrow

Reissued by C. J. B.
With an Introduction by

Dr Paul Deussen

Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel

LONDON
JOHN M. WATKINS

21 CECIL COURT, CHARING CROSS ROAD
IQIO

£~

PREFATORY NOTE

THE kind reception accorded by the public to my recent issue of the Threefold Life of Man has enabled me to proceed further with the proposed reprint of the complete works of Jacob Boehme, and I trust the present volume will be received with equal favour. If such be the case, I propose to issue next the Forty Questions of the Soul, together with the Clavis. For the prospectus giving a list of these questions, and stating the subscription price of the volume, etc., applications should be sent to the undersigned, or to the publisher.

A complete list of Boehme's writings will be found in the Threefold Life, Appendix A. I regret to say that, in correcting the proofs of that Appendix, I inadvertently allowed it to appear that the Three Principles was written in the same year as the Aurora. The former belongs to 1618-19, the latter to 1612.

The Introduction to this volume is a translation, by my friend Mrs D. S. Hehner, of the paper

195026

VI THE THREE PRINCIPLES

on Jacob Boehme: His Life and Philosophy, by Professor Deussen, who has kindly allowed me to use it in the present work. To both author and translator I desire to offer my most cordial thanks.

C. J. BARKER.

HILL CROFT, RUSSELL HILL,
PURLBY, SURREY,
January 1910.

The Second "Book.

CONCERNING

The Three Principles

The Divine Eflence

Of the Eternal, Dark, Light, and Temporary World. SHEWING

What the Soul, the Image and the

Spirit of the Soul are ; as alfo what Angels,
Heaven, and Paradise are.

How <Adam was before the Fall, in the Fall, and after the Fall.

AND

What the Wrath of God, Sin, Death, the Devils and Hell are ; How all things have been, now are, and how they shall be at the Last.

Written in the German Language by yacob Ttehmen;

<iAlias Teutonicus Thilofophus

LONDON;

Printed by M. S. for H. Elunden at the Castle in Cornhill. 1648.

TO THE READER

SINCE the publishing of this author's Forty Questions in English, the minds of several persons have had divers thoughts concerning his writings, and yet have been of searching apprehensions. I would they were well acquainted with his writings, and then they would not only be able to find out the truth in their own thoughts, but also in the written words of him and others, as in the Articles and Confessions of Faith, or any other writings. And it may be, these thoughts they have, though they be true, if rightly understood, yet if they may perhaps be misapprehended, they may hinder themselves of inestimable eternal benefit.

Some have complained of the hardness to understand his writings, and therefore I have endeavoured the Englishing of this book of the Three Principles, which, the author saith, is the A, B, C to all his writings ; and if they read it carefully, they will find it, though hard at first, easy at last, and then all his other books easy, and full of deep understanding. A man cannot conceive the wonderful knowledge before he hath read this book throughly

X THE THREE PRINCIPLES

page 1

Concerning

The Three Principles

The Divine Essence

Of the Eternal, Dark, Light, and Temporary World

Concerning

The Three Principles

The Divine Essence

Jacob Boehme

Translated by John Sparrow

Reissued by C. J. B.
With an Introduction by

Dr Paul Deussen

Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel

LONDON
JOHN M. WATKINS

21 CECIL COURT, CHARING CROSS ROAD
IQIO

£~

PREFATORY NOTE

The Introduction to this volume is a translation, by my friend Mrs D. S. Hehner, of the paper

195026

VI THE THREE PRINCIPLES

on Jacob Boehme: His Life and Philosophy, by Professor Deussen, who has kindly allowed me to use it in the present work. To both author and translator I desire to offer my most cordial thanks.

C. J. BARKER.

HILL CROFT, RUSSELL HILL,
PURLBY, SURREY,
January 1910.

The Second "Book.

CONCERNING

The Three Principles

The Divine Eflence

Of the Eternal, Dark, Light, and Temporary World. SHEWING

What the Soul, the Image and the

Spirit of the Soul are ; as alfo what Angels,
Heaven, and Paradise are.

How <Adam was before the Fall, in the Fall, and after the Fall.

AND

What the Wrath of God, Sin, Death, the Devils and Hell are ; How all things have been, now are, and how they shall be at the Last.

Written in the German Language by yacob Ttehmen;

<iAlias Teutonicus Thilofophus

LONDON;

Printed by M. S. for H. Elunden at the Castle in Cornhill. 1648.

TO THE READER

Some have complained of the hardness to understand his writings, and therefore I have endeavoured the Englishing of this book of the Three Principles, which, the author says, is the A, B, C to all his writings ; and if they read it carefully, they will find it, though hard at first, easy at last, and then all his other books easy, and full of deep understanding. A man cannot conceive the wonderful knowledge before he has read this book throughly

X THE THREE PRINCIPLES

Commentary

page 1 ·

Cross-estate§003

This English 'Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence' and boehme:11 are the same work in two languages — and the French is not just any translation. It is Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's own: 'Des trois principes de l'essence divine', issued by the Périsse brothers of the rue Mercière. Saint-Martin learned German in his fifties expressly to read Boehme, and spent his last years translating him. The estate therefore holds, side by side, the text that formed the Unknown Philosopher and the form in which he gave it to France — the single most direct documentary link between the two founders of this corpus.

is translated as Des trois principes de l'essence divine — trad. Saint-Martin

Comparative§001

Set the two title pages beside each other and the difference is one of posture. The French presents an unlettered cobbler whose style will disappoint and whose invective has been preserved on principle. The English presents an academic apparatus — a professor, a chair, a named translator of the introduction — around a text three centuries old. Neither is misrepresenting the book. They are answering different anxieties about why a reader should trust it.

contrasts with Des trois principes de l'essence divine — trad. Saint-Martin

Historical§001

The English route is different in every particular. This is John Sparrow's seventeenth-century translation, reissued in London in 1910 by John M. Watkins of Cecil Court, "Reissued by C. J. B.", carrying an introduction by "Dr Paul Deussen, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel" — itself a translation, by Mrs D. S. Hehner, of a German paper. So the English reader of 1910 receives a Jacobean translation of Boehme wrapped in a modern German scholar's essay rendered into English by a third hand.

is a parallel edition of Des trois principes de l'essence divine — trad. Saint-Martin

Historical§002

The 1910 editor prints a correction against himself: "in correcting the proofs of that Appendix, I inadvertently allowed it to appear that the Three Principles was written in the same year as the Aurora. The former belongs to 1618-19, the latter to 1612." Six or seven years between them, not none. The correction is checkable inside this reader, which holds the Aurora as its own issue, and it is a reminder that a printed erratum is evidence of care rather than of carelessness.

is dated against Aurora, or the Day-Spring

Historical§003

Sparrow's own preface locates the book in a live argument: "SINCE the publishing of this author's Forty Questions in English, the minds of several persons have had divers thoughts concerning his writings, and yet have been of searching apprehensions." He is answering readers who have already met Boehme in English and are unsettled by him. The Forty Questions he names is held here as its own issue, so the sequence he assumes his reader has followed can actually be followed.

presupposes The Forty Questions of the Soul

Historical§001

Paul Deussen, whom this volume identifies only by his Kiel chair, is reported to have been a Sanskritist and the friend and editor of Schopenhauer's reception — which would make the 1910 framing of Boehme a deliberate placement of him in a comparative-philosophy lineage rather than a devotional one. The volume itself does not say so, and this note is marked reported for that reason: the claim rests on outside biography, not on anything printed here.